It was December and there had been a lot of rain, and one of the wagons broke through a bridge close to the mill and the men come to their house to wake him up and borrow some log tackle to get the wagon out—”
“It’s God’s abomination of womanflesh!” the old man cries suddenly.
Then his voice drops, lowers; it is as though he were merely gaining attention.
He talks again rapidly, his tone plausible, vague, fanatic, speaking of himself again in the third person. “He knowed.
Old Doc Hines knowed.
He had seen the womansign of God’s abomination already on her, under her clothes.
So when he went and put on his raincoat and lit the lantern and come back, she was already at the door, with a raincoat on too and he said,
‘You get on back to bed,’ and she said,
‘I want to go too,’ and he said,
‘You get on back inside that room,’ and she went back and he went down and got the big tackle from the mill and got the wagon out.
Till nigh daybreak he worked, believing she had obeyed the command of the father the Lord had given her.
But he ought to knowed.
He ought to knowed God’s abomination of womanflesh; he should have knowed the walking shape of bitchery and abomination already stinking in God’s sight.
Telling Old Doc Hines, that knowed better, that he was a Mexican.
When Old Doc Hines could see in his face the black curse of God Almighty.
Telling him—”
“What?” Hightower says.
He speaks loudly, as if he had anticipated having to drown the other’s voice by sheer volume. “What is this?”
“It was a fellow with the circus,” Byron says. “She told him that the man was a Mexican, the daughter told him when he caught her.
Maybe that’s what the fellow told the gal.
But he”—again he indicates the old man—“knew somehow that the fellow had nigger blood.
Maybe the circus folks told him.
I don’t know.
He ain’t never said how he found out, like that never made any difference.
And I reckon it didn’t, after the next night.”
“The next night?”
“I reckon she slipped out that night when the circus was stuck.
He says she did.
Anyway, he acted like it, and what he did could not have happened if he hadn’t known and she hadn’t slipped out.
Because the next day she went in to the circus with some neighbors.
He let her go, because he didn’t know then that she had slipped out the night before.
He didn’t suspect anything even when she came out to get into the neighbor’s wagon with her Sunday dress on.
But he was waiting for the wagon when it came back that night, listening for it, when it came up the road and passed the house. like it was not. going to stop to let her out.
And he ran out and called, and the neighbor stopped the wagon and the gal wasn’t in it.
The neighbor said that she had left them on the circus lot, to spend the night with another girl that lived about six miles away, and the neighbor wondered how Hines didn’t know about it, because he said that the gal had her grip with her when she got into the wagon.
Hines hadn’t seen the grip.
And she—” this time he indicates the stonefaced woman; she may or may not be listening to what he is saying—“she says it was the devil that guided him.
She says he could not have known anymore than she did, where the gal was then, and yet he come into the house and got his pistol and knocked her down across the bed when she tried to stop him and saddled his horse and rode off.
And she said he took the only short cut he could possibly have taken, choosing it in the dark, out of a half a dozen of them, that would ever have caught up with them.
And yet it wasn’t any possible way that he could have known which road they had taken.
But he did.
He found them like he had known all the time just where they would be, like him and the man that his gal told him was a Mexican had made a date to meet there.
It was like he knew.
It was pitch dark, and even when he caught up with a buggy, there wasn’t any way he could have told it was the one he wanted.
But he rode right up behind the buggy, the first buggy he had seen that night.
He rode up on the right side of it and he leaned down, still in the pitch dark and without saying a word and without stopping his horse, and grabbed the man that might have been a stranger or a neighbor for all he could have known by sight or hearing.
Grabbed him by one hand and held the pistol against him with the other and shot him dead and brought the gal back home behind him on the horse.
He left the buggy and the man both there in the road.
It was raining again, too.”
He ceases.